The first day of coursework at MIT ended, for me, with a quiet realization that I had not taken structured notes on a topic I did not already have an opinion about in roughly twenty years. Everything I write at work is either a decision, a plan, or a response. Notes on someone else's thinking, for the purpose of understanding rather than answering, is a different muscle. It has atrophied.
This is the first of what I plan to be a recurring series on the experience of returning to formal study mid-career. I will not publish the specifics of the program or the coursework; those belong in the academic setting, not on a blog. What I will share is the experience of being in the classroom again, and whatever crosses back over into how I think about my professional work.
The meeting-brain problem
My default working mode, after two decades of operational leadership, is to sit down in a room and start making calls. Someone presents a situation; I evaluate, decide, delegate, move on. That mode is efficient in its native habitat and actively counterproductive in a classroom. The instructor is not presenting a situation for me to decide on. They are presenting a framework for me to absorb.
I caught myself, several times in the first session, preparing a response when I should have been writing down a question. The reflex is strong. Unlearning it is going to be part of the work.
How much the field has moved
This is the humbling part. Twenty years of practitioner experience buys you depth in the subjects you have actively worked on. It does not automatically keep you current on subjects the academic literature has been developing in parallel. The specific language, the framing, the preferred models — all of it has shifted in ways I had registered at the headline level but not internalized.
Sitting in a room where everyone else speaks that language fluently is a good corrective. You learn quickly which of your mental models are still current, which have been refined, and which are frankly out of date. That is uncomfortable. It is also precisely the reason you go back.
The "why" question versus the "how" question
Industry optimizes for how. How do we ship this. How do we scale it. How do we keep it running under load. Academia, at least from the first week's exposure, optimizes for why. Why does the system behave this way. Why is this class of solution preferable to that one. Why does the tradeoff look the way it does.
Those are not opposed. They are layered. A practitioner who cannot answer why is eventually overtaken by someone who can, because the why questions are the ones that generalize. The how questions, over a long enough horizon, are commodity. This is obvious when you say it. It is less obvious when you are heads-down executing for years at a time.
Rebuilding note-taking
I spent an evening this week looking for a note-taking system that would actually stick. I tried, in rough order: a paper notebook, a markdown file per lecture, and a hybrid where paper notes get rewritten into markdown within twenty-four hours. The hybrid is winning so far. The rewriting step is where the actual learning seems to happen. The first capture is too fast to internalize.
If there is a reader here considering a similar path, the advice from the first week is: assume your tooling from twenty years ago will not work, and assume your tooling from work will not either. This is a different use case and it deserves a fresh setup.
Why do this at all
A fair question. I could reasonably argue that two decades of operational practice is the education. In a narrow sense, that is true. In a broader sense, I do not want to be the executive who confuses having been in the room for a long time with still understanding what is being built there. The field is moving. I want to keep moving with it, not alongside it.
There is also a simpler reason. I like the work. Sitting with a hard problem, not because I need to solve it by Friday but because I want to understand it, is a good way to spend an evening. I had forgotten.
What to expect from this series
I will write these as I go. Expect them to be uneven. Some will be short observations, some will be longer reflections on specific ideas, and some will be honest acknowledgements that I am struggling with a topic. I would rather the series be truthful than polished.
If you are another mid-career practitioner considering going back, the best thing I can say after week one is this: the first week is supposed to be disorienting. That is the feature. It is the same disorientation that makes the learning possible. Sit with it.
More notes as the term progresses. The broader context for this journey lives on the MIT Journey page.
Expertise, left alone long enough, becomes habit. Formal study is one of the few forcing functions I have found that converts it back into thinking.